


Painted Faces

by ingthing



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: 1800s, Angst, Boulton and Park, Britpicked, Canon Compliant, Character Study, England (Country), Fanny and Stella, Historical, Historical Accuracy, Hurt/Comfort, Immortality, LGBTQ Themes, London, M/M, Melancholy, Mutual Pining, Victorian, ft. In depth Historical Notes and References for you nerds in the audience, period-typical xenophobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-30 00:17:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20805380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ingthing/pseuds/ingthing
Summary: Aziraphale has been aware of humanity's propensity for contradicting itself since the very beginning. It was, he thought, just another element of the Ineffable Plan, and so he kept this knowledge in the back of his mind the way one might leave an old textbook to collect dust on a high shelf. A book which one may never think to open again, but still lingered in the mind as an intrinsic part to an overall confounding learning experience.In 1870 he is reminded of this frustrating ineffability by an unusual newspaper headline, and the angel falters.Mid-Victorian Attitudes and the Case of Boulton and Park, as remembered and ruminated on by A. Z. Fell.





	Painted Faces

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a while since I wrote a fic, but this idea took hold of me and wouldn't let go.
> 
> Thank you to the wonderful [vol_ctrl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vol_ctrl/pseuds/vol_ctrl) and [Literarion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Literarion/pseuds/Literarion) for egging me on through my research induced madness and whipping my nonsense into shape!
> 
> You will find a link to my Historical Accuracy Notes in the end notes.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this, reader!

_London, 1870_

The routine of sitting down to a good cup of tea and the day's mass-distributed newspaper had, unlike other rising trends through history, been adopted by Aziraphale rather quickly upon the London Gazette's introduction two centuries ago. It befitted his image as a kind, well-to-do second-hand book seller, so the daily paper was yet another of those thoroughly human things the angel liked to keep around for the purpose of "blending in with the natives"—at least, that's what he had said in his official correspondence with Heaven:

> _ WORLDLY RIGHTEOUSNESS MEMO NO. 68,030 _
> 
> _ Earth Date: The First day of the Third month of the year Sixteen-hundred and Sixty-six A.D. _
> 
> _ Dear Archangel Gabriel, _
> 
> _ I am pleased to report that the plague that has been wiping out a not insignificant portion of the human population of London has subsided, and an upsurgence of hope has begun to spread throughout the city! _
> 
> _ I learned of this occurrence from something new that humans have created—something called a "newes-paper". It's a sheet of paper that is sold to the masses for just a ha'penny, and its contents recount the most significant human developments of the day. I have taken to reading the newes-paper every morning for the purposes of surveying human activity and mingling with the crowd, as everyone seems to be in possession of a newes-paper as of late. _
> 
> _ Faith amongst the masses is seeing an uptrend, and I shall be working on improving the condition of charity in this region. _
> 
> _ Yours very faithfully, _
> 
> _ The Principality Aziraphale _

Gabriel didn't have much to say about these "newes-papers", but then again, he didn't have much to say about _ anything _ Aziraphale reported, unless there was an excess of miracles involved. It took another century and a half for Heaven's own newspaper, _ The Celestial Observer _, to be instituted. By that time, Aziraphale had already marvelled hundreds of times over the fact that, rather than relying on word of mouth or being in the right place at the right time, or waiting for a celestial beam of light to tell him what to pay attention to, he could simply sit back and read. 

(The written word, Aziraphale thought, was really one of humanity's greatest inventions and pleasures.)

As time passed, the daily paper changed. Two hundred and nine years had shifted what humans thought other humans needed to know an awful lot, and they added sections to their newspapers accordingly—things like railroad stocks, results from the horse races, ship arrivals, and news from far off places like Turkey and India. 

One mainstay, however, was the _ Law & Police _ section. Though Aziraphale did not always agree with the means by which humans governed themselves, legislation was put in place, the angel was sure, from a place of goodwill and a concern for the greater good. He could never fault that—most of the reports were about all the terrible things humans did to one another anyway, and it was a good thing other Londoners knew such acts were frowned upon.

This particular morning, however, the _ Law & Police _ section set a deep furrow in the angel's brow. He adjusted his superfluous reading glasses, his gaze glued to the neatly printed sheet in his hand.

"A great crowd assembled this morning to hear the evidence against two gentlemen... who had been detected by the police in frequenting the Strand Theatre dressed as _ women _?" Aziraphale read aloud. The quiet weight of unease manifested itself in his chest.

He was far from mortal, but Aziraphale couldn't help but feel very human at times like this. 

Spending several millennia on Earth had clearly affected him—he had followed as humanity progressed, reinventing his guises and tasting the ever-changing sentiments in the air, like the bouquet of a fine wine, wherever he had been stationed. For the better part of the past thousand or so years, he had been on the British Isles, in what was now London, and he'd grown to love it. All the clever little things humans had created there, like theatre, and music, and afternoon tea were things Aziraphale had come to care a lot about. 

It was what he did, being an angel—he _cared_ about things. And caring meant that he couldn't just forget about things that didn't feel right.

So, rather than skip ahead to the next riveting section of the news on the day's money market, Aziraphale kept reading, straightening the pages with a soft crinkle.

There was a good portion of the text dedicated to simply describing the prisoners' appearances; the men had been dressed in vibrant crimson silk and green satin, flaxen wigs and lace shawls, which certainly didn't seem like a crime by Aziraphale's standards. The police had even gone as far as to search their _ rooms _, finding women's clothing and jewellery alongside photographs of the men dressed as women. 

The angel's jaw had dropped by the time he had reached the end of the article. The two men—Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park—had been lingering around the theatre for a fortnight, but according to the article they hadn't done anything remotely worthy of arrest, unless "bowing to gentlemen in the stalls" was suddenly a criminal offence. What's more, Mr. Flowers of the Bow Street Magistrate's Courts suspected them of… Of seeking gentlemen to take to their lodgings for money. From _ bowing _.

As someone who bowed fairly frequently as dictated by current etiquette conventions, Aziraphale didn't know what to make of this. There wasn't ever a real meaning to his bows; he'd always seen them as a nice courtesy, an emphasis on his hellos and goodbyes. 

Picking up the now tepid cup of tea resting on a saucer on his desk, the angel took an absent-minded sip as he looked at the open newspaper before him, not really able to focus on the rest of the page. He decided that it might be a wise choice to put the news aside for the rest of the afternoon—or at least, until his nagging sense of duty compelled him to finish reading the rest.

* * *

The issues of the _ Pall Mall Gazette _ Aziraphale received in the following week were curiously uneventful, save for the usual train accidents and petty crimes. This, the angel took as a good sign. He closed each day's paper with zest upon finding an absence of news regarding the two men.

"Perhaps they were able to settle the case out of court," Aziraphale mused quietly. His mind wandered as his fingers moved across the spines of the fairy tale books he had only just gotten around to having time for, a little more than twenty years after acquiring them. He had almost forgotten about them entirely, as they were placed on such a high shelf. (Aziraphale didn't particularly like climbing library ladders and tended to refrain from using his powers to pull from his collection. It didn't feel like the right treatment for his books, and frivolous miracles would surely earn him a reprimanding from headquarters.) "Yes," he agreed to himself, "the magistrate could have realised what a terrible mistake he has made and let them go before the whole affair got out of hand." 

The angel nodded as if to assure himself that the magistrate really had let the two dress-wearing men go free. He selected one of the books to bring down the ladder to his desk, cradling the tome close to his heart in one cotton-gloved hand as he descended. 

It always sent such a thrill down Aziraphale's corporeal spine to sit down to a never before opened book. This one was titled _ Wonderful Stories for Children, _ featuring translations of works by one H. C. Andersen. He'd gotten it in, oh, was it 1846? It had been very recent, but Aziraphale had several thousand years' worth of memories, and the years blurred together easily. He had never been a child in the human sense, but he still occasionally liked to read stories meant for human children because they could be so delightful. Such light reading sounded very appealing, with all the unease that had been swirling around Aziraphale's gut over the past few days.

His glasses were slipped on fastidiously, its frame held between his thumbs and forefingers. The angel took a moment to admire the exquisite leather tooling on the cover, almost forgetting he meant to read, as he tried to place what the whimsical embossed flourishes reminded him of—a medieval tapestry's ornate border, possibly, or the intricate gold filigree of a painting frame. Decorative motifs through the past few centuries had tended to cycle back around, but that was an inquiry for another time. Aziraphale opened the front cover with a delicate touch and began to read.

Every so often, the back-and-forth turn of his head as he followed each line was punctuated by a smile, or an interested raise of his eyebrows, or an expelled breath from his nose. There were quite a few sympathetic "oohs" at the more unpleasant details, but they were still better than other stories Aziraphale had read in the past. Children's tales used to be much worse and often more gruesome, for the sake of moral argument.

An hour or two passed, and he came upon the fourth story in the book: something about an ugly duckling. Aziraphale always did find baby animals, great and small, so very dear—he was looking forward to this story, and he wiggled in his seat to get more comfortable before delving back in. Words could bring him back in time to the things he'd experienced like nothing else on Earth. He could bask in the warmth of country sun on his skin, smell the freshness of newly cut hay, and hear the rustle of trees being swept by a gentle breeze, as phantom sensations from his perch in his little book shop in Soho. Humans had such an amazing talent for expressing the minuscule details in the splendour of God's creation.

Aziraphale's eyes crinkled at their edges and his lips turned up into a smile as he read of the expectant duck mother and her brood, who were cracking out of their shells.

> _ "What a great world it is, to be sure," said the little ones, when they found how much more room they had than when they were in the eggshell. _
> 
> _ "Is this all the world, do you imagine?" said the mother. "Wait till you have seen the garden. Far beyond that it stretches down to the pastor's field, though I have never ventured to such a distance…" _

Curiously, there was one large egg with a very hard shell remaining, and an older duck supposed it must be a Guinea fowl's—Aziraphale hadn't known that that was a common occurrence for ducks.

(Aziraphale liked fowl. Especially with a berry sauce.)

> _ At last the great egg broke, and the latest bird cried, "Peep, peep," as he crept forth from the shell. How big and ugly he was! The mother duck stared at him and did not know what to think. "Really," she said, "this is an enormous duckling, and it is not at all like any of the others. I wonder if he will turn out to be a Guinea fowl. Well, we shall see when we get to the water—for into the water he must go, even if I have to push him in myself." _

Aziraphale frowned as he read on. This new duckling had an "ugly gray-coat", and though he could swim as well as any of his siblings, no one seemed to like him or even want him around. The old ducks in the farmyard thought his siblings very pretty, but called the ugly duckling a queer-looking object and bit him in the neck! The angel gasped at this, surprised by such boldfaced cruelty. At the very least, his mother seemed to take the duckling's side, if only to say he would grow up strong and take care of himself—Aziraphale _ so _ hoped he would.

The duckling didn't seem to fare much better after that—the bullying didn't cease, and he ran away from the farmyard.

_ "What sort of duck are you?" _ The wild ducks beyond the farmyard probed. The duckling couldn't respond, and despite his politeness, they called him exceedingly ugly. The wild ducks said it didn't matter, as long as the duckling didn't marry one of _ their _ family, a notion the duckling hadn't even considered.

The bell above the bookshop's door chimed, signalling new customers—Aziraphale didn't take his eyes off the page as he told them, offhand, to ring the bell in front if they needed any assistance. He breathed a sigh of relief when the duckling met some goslings by a moor, who seemed to like him well enough .

A paragraph later, the goslings fell dead, their blood tingeing the water—they had been shot down by hunters. The duckling hid his head under his wing as smoke from their guns rose and their dogs inspected the area. 

_ "Oh," _ sighed the duckling after a large, terrible dog passed near him, sniffed around, and then went away, _ "how thankful I am for being so ugly; even a dog will not bite me." _

The book had rudely chosen this moment of suspense to possess uncut pages—whoever had cut the edge of this book had clearly missed the last signature. 

"Oh, _ sugar _ ." Aziraphale uttered as he pulled the desk drawer to his left open and felt around in it for his ivory and silver paper-knife. He had quite appreciated the practice of separating each page of a book before mechanical book edge-cutters had been invented; there was something enchanting about the ritual. This process, however, was generally more appreciated _ before _ rather than _ in the midst _of reading. There were quite a few uncut pages, so Aziraphale readied his blade in a practiced position. 

First, he had to crease the pages, so that a clean, even cut might be made. This, he achieved by running the edge of the paper knife along the edge of each page with light force.

From the centre atrium of the bookshop, two voices came within earshot.

"Have you been keeping up with the news lately, Jameson? From the police courts?"

Aziraphale slipped the blade in between the leaves and sliced neatly through the first crease with a quiet _ sshhk _.

"Indeed I have," Jameson's voice scoffed. "Why, those men—it's _ deplorable _."

The blade paused, as though waiting with bated breath, before continuing on.

"What are their names, '_ Fanny _ and _ Stella _'?" The first voice inquired, with emphasis on Boulton and Park's stage names.

"Yes, to those in the know." Jameson said, with the lilt of someone who delighted in knowing such "classified" information.

_ Sshk. _

"Men in _ petticoats _." There was a condescending bite to the first man's voice that Aziraphale didn't like. "In this day and age? You would think Molly houses and the like would have been dissolved by now."

_ Sshhk. _

"Far from it. Just a short distance from here is the very den of _ sin _ to which those two _ Mary-Anns _ beckoned reputable gentlemen like you and I, and I have heard there are many others like them." There was the sound of a book being picked up and perused, the sharp flick of its pages like sparks of fire to Aziraphale's ears.

_ SSHHK. _

"This is their comeuppance, no doubt," Jameson continued in an eerily self-justified tone. "For defying the natural order of things—what punishments cannot be afforded to them by the magistrate will surely be bestowed upon them in-"

With a final, scathing slice of the paper-knife through paper that was felt through the entire bookshop, Aziraphale rose from his desk, as incensed as he had ever been.

"Out! We're closed. You have to go away now." He declared, turning and walking purposefully towards the gossipers with a shooing motion. 

"Excuse me?" The man Aziraphale had identified as Jameson asked, defiant.

"I'm afraid we are now _ closed _ ." The angel reiterated, narrowing his eyes with a knitting of his brow to emphasise the last word. Plucking the book out of Jameson's hands, he ushered them both towards the miraculously opened door. "But Mr. Perkins' shop on Compton Street offers a _ wide _ variety of conversational etiquette manuals which _ you _ gentlemen may find very illuminating!" 

Their top hats and shoulders clashing as they were forced through the half-open doorway, the two "gentlemen" were left outside. The heavy door shut behind them, the brass lock turned with a click, and the hanging sign in the window was turned to "closed". 

Aziraphale leaned against a nearby pillar and hugged the book in his hands with a deep sigh before pacing back to his office. A dam of emotions had broken in his mind, and the conflicting thoughts mixed about as well as oil and water. He landed on the leather love-seat behind his desk, exhausted.

The paper knife had been left, abandoned, on top of the book it had been servicing. 

> _ And so the ugly duckling lay quite still, while the shot rattled through the rushes and gun after gun was fired over him. It was late in the day before all became quiet, but even then the poor young thing did not dare to move. He waited quietly for several hours and then, after looking carefully around him, hastened away from the moor as fast as he could. _

* * *

It took a visit to a nearby baker's for a currant-laden teacake to calm Aziraphale's nerves. He had been distracting himself with repositioning and reordering books before he went, and to have everything neat and orderly would only encourage more customers to wander into his shop: the exact opposite of what he wanted, especially after the events earlier that afternoon. He was back on the love-seat now, head leaned back onto it, his tartan bow tie and starched collar loosened for comfort, though not all the way—it wouldn't do to be _ completely _ undone before daylight had subsided. There was an unopened bottle of port and the appropriate stemware on the side table nearby. It was merely there in case he wanted it; Aziraphale wouldn't usually drink alone. 

The appalling conversation he'd overheard earlier still whispered in the back of his head. There was, in part, also the lingering guilt that he shouldn't have stuck his nose where it didn't belong—eavesdropping was not something he, an angel, could endorse. The larger issue that remained was the question of _ why _ the humans of this century seemed to be coping so terribly with something Aziraphale considered so unimportant.

Well, not "unimportant." Inconsequential. Natural. _ Human _. 

In his time on Earth, the angel had met many, many people. Some hadn't been the nicest, but all in all, humans were a decent bunch. There had certainly been humans who set themselves apart from the crowd, who chose to present themselves in a different light than one might expect.

If reminiscing was the order of the day, Aziraphale decided as he hummed and scratched at one sideburn, he might want that drink after all, if only to have something to fiddle with. A modest amount of the wine poured itself into a narrow glass before appearing gracefully in Aziraphale's well manicured hands. 

The notion of men in figurative petticoats had been around for quite a long time. Not only had theatrical performances predating Shakespeare featured men in women's roles, but wearing clothing often meant for the other sex—Aziraphale didn't think humans had invented a word for it yet—stretched back as far as he could remember, even to the time of the Greeks. Well, not the _current_ Greeks, Aziraphale corrected his mental rambling. The modern Greeks, he was sure, were lovely people, but he meant the ones who had been around till about 600 A.D. Their comedies and tragedies had featured men in women's _peplos_ tunics and _epiblema_, with expressively sculpted masks to match_. _No one had really thought that strange, back then. 

Beyond the actors who played those roles, the _ stories _ they portrayed often featured such disguises, too. This seemed to be a trend in human mythology as far as Aziraphale could tell, from the tales he had heard and the works of art he had seen—the Norse god Thor had dressed as Freyja to take back Mjölnir from the giants. The Greco-Roman Hercules and Omphale, Queen of Lydia, exchanged roles and clothing in a switch of their power dynamic, with the queen taking Hercules' Nemean Lion skin _ . _ Even further back in the recesses of his memory, Aziraphale recalled something about the Sumerian deity Inanna _ , _ who was depicted as shifting across all the sexes and who bridged Heaven and Earth. 

The latter seemed to match the metaphysical bridge, or rather, the bridge of the human forms of angelic agents who occupied both Heaven and Earth. (The _ actual _bridge between the two planes was presently at the top of a very long, spiralling staircase in the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, which always left Aziraphale winded when Heaven felt like skimping on celestial gateways.) Nonetheless, humans had gotten the part about angels being unbound to their physical anatomies right, at that point in time.

Then why, oh _ why _ were humans so hung up on each others' clothing preferences now? Aziraphale wondered, sighing heavily as he swirled the tawny alcohol in his raised glass. It glowed orange, almost gold, in snatches of miracle-enhanced candlelight. He brought it away from the flickering source, watching the liquid darken, and then brought it back, squinting at its sudden but unsurprising illumination.

"_All that we see or seem, _ " Aziraphale murmured to himself with the pacing of a dramatic narrator of some great epic, _ "is but a dream within a dream." _ He looked off into the distance—in this case, the pillar opposite him—and couldn't quite recall the rest of that poem from a few decades ago. 

It certainly seemed as though the past several thousand years of the angel's existence could have been what humans called "a dream." Like actors and actresses who performed on stage, he too had assumed different guises over time, changing whatever covered his body to suit his environment and the disposition he wanted to evoke. True, he had made some mistakes—dressing in lace and brocade in the middle of the French Revolution had landed him in the Bastille, closer to discorporation than was comfortable. He knew why, of course—the disparity between the rich and the poor had become so inflamed it had erupted in senseless barbarity. 

(The crêpes and brioche had just been too enticing for Aziraphale to resist. He could do with a crêpe or two now, but just under a century later it was still _ quite _ impossible to find decent crêpes in London.)

A sip of port ran smooth and potent down Aziraphale's throat, and he cast his gaze about the room; it had grown dimmer since he'd started musing. His office was filled near to the brim with mementos and trinkets of the past, with ribboned-up letters and scrolls stuffed into every nook and cranny. He remembered many of the people connected to these writings, but he'd have to re-read to recall the rest of them.

In the top left compartment of his secretary desk and to the right of the sonnet drafts he had provided constructive feedback to Shakespeare on, there were letters from a young lad named John who went by the title of Princess Seraphina. Aziraphale had met them at a masquerade in the early 1700s when Seraphina had been in full regalia, but everyone seemed to call them by the nickname regardless of whether they were in a gown or in breeches. Their and Aziraphale's correspondence had waned after several letters produced no sustainable basis for a friendship, but it was still a delight to spot the Princess flitting around Haymarket in their striking scarlet cloak and white frock. 

Once, when Aziraphale had decided to live a little, he had visited a Molly house, just to see what it was like. They sounded merry, from Seraphina's retellings. 

It had been a festival night filled with music and singing and dancing, and Aziraphale had stayed quietly on the sidelines, identity concealed by a simple mask around his eyes. There were costumes of all kinds and petticoats swirling around the pub floor; the angel didn't know the tunes, nor did he dance, but the exuberance and pure enjoyment bubbling in the air was far from sinister. It was an intoxicating aura of love, and love wasn't _ wrong _. 

He may also have ensured that some of the attendees, when accosted by Peace-Officers for mild misbehaviour, were pardoned miraculously. It was a delightful time otherwise.

Another character Aziraphale had crossed paths with more recently was a brusque man, a doctor of some kind, the angel had thought, who had first come into his shop looking for a very particular anatomy book. Though he didn't typically stock such materials and didn't have the exact book the customer had requested, Aziraphale had been able to recommend a similar book and the doctor became something of a regular. Each occasional post request for not-uncommon-but-uncommon enough medical literature was addressed from "James Barry". When the Crimean War began one more note came, along with a polite manservant who paid all of Barry's dues. He was, apparently, a military doctor, and one rumored to have very good bedside manner despite his argumentative nature. 

When, after the surgeon's death, the news broke that he had physically been a "she", it wasn't surprising to Aziraphale—angels, being ethereal entities, knew a lot of things on first acquaintance that humans would never know unless made known to them. For instance, Aziraphale knew that the gentleman walking past his office window now liked the smell of gardenias and thought it a shame they only bloomed in the brief English summertime. 

He would be able to learn more if he sobered up, but the angel didn't want to. Thoughts always seemed to roll about so frictionlessly whenever he was inebriated.

A few moments later, Aziraphale had lost the thread of his ruminating. The figurative bobbin of his thoughts had rolled too far and dropped off a mental tabletop, tangling it beyond salvation. He stared into the near-empty glass in his hand instead, the once-abundant port reduced to a drop in the bottom of his cup. 

It was a very hard thing, for one to feel lost in a world one thought they knew.

The angel had considered himself fairly good at navigating the human realm, having made careful observations and becoming, he considered, something of an expert on humanity. These new developments, however, had knocked his confidence. This was silly, he knew—humans often did nonsensical things, but there was something about the case of Boulton and Park that gnawed at his heartstrings. 

He couldn't quite empathise entirely with that ugly duckling, but Aziraphale felt as though he had been ripped from his farmyard and through a moor to the whizz of bullets and gun-smoke overhead. 

Whisked beyond the garden, beyond the pastor's field and into a world that looked and smelled familiar but threatened the unknown, the angel felt inescapably alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments and Kudos are much appreciated.
> 
> I will do my best to have updates up within a week and a half of each chapter's release.
> 
> If you are at all interested in the historical references in this fic, here's a link to my [Far Too Detailed Historical Accuracy Notes](https://tinyurl.com/ingthing-pfnotes).


End file.
